Mental Practice Outperformed Physical Practice After 10 Days — Here Is What That Means for Your Setlist

You are in the car on the way to the gig. The venue is forty minutes out. You could listen to the setlist on the drive. Or you could practice it, without touching your instrument, without looking at a chart, just running the songs in your head.

Most musicians would call that wasted time. A 2021 study suggests otherwise.

The Guitarist Study

A team of European researchers recruited 26 classical guitarists from music universities in Italy and Denmark and asked them to learn a piece by Giovanni Zamboni Romano, the "Sarabanda."¹

Half the guitarists were assigned to a physical practice group: 30 minutes of normal, hands-on practice each day. The other half were assigned to a mental practice group: 20 minutes of mental practice followed by only 10 minutes of physical practice.

The mental practice instructions were simple: "[Focus] on the pitch, finger movements, rhythm or any other mental technique they liked, but without physically playing the instrument or writing the piece." In other words, they sat with the music, eyes closed or looking at the score, and imagined playing it.

Both groups practiced daily for a week. At the end of the week, both groups could perform the piece.

Then came the real test. The guitarists stopped practicing entirely. Ten days later, they returned to the lab and were asked to play the piece again, cold, no warmup, no review session.

The mental practice group remembered more.

Why the Combination Works

Mental practice is not a replacement for physical practice. The group that did only mental practice did not outperform the physical group during the initial learning phase. The advantage showed up later, after the gap.

This points to something important about how memory consolidates. Physical practice builds the motor patterns: where your fingers go, how the changes feel under your hands. Mental practice builds the cognitive map: what comes next, how the sections relate, where the hazards are. When you combine them, you are building two reinforcing representations of the same material.

A guitarist who has only played the piece physically has one retrieval path. A guitarist who has played it and walked through it mentally has at least two. When one path is partially blocked, by adrenaline, by fatigue, by the unfamiliar feel of a stage instrument, the other path can still get you through.

This aligns with what researchers in motor learning call the "symbolic learning theory" of mental practice: mental rehearsal strengthens the cognitive components of a skill, leaving the motor components to be handled by physical practice.² Neither is sufficient alone. Together, they are more durable than either one separately.

What Mental Practice Looks Like for a Gigging Musician

You do not need to sit in a quiet room with your eyes closed for 20 minutes. Mental practice scales to the time and context you actually have.

On the drive to the gig. Pick a song from tonight's setlist that has tripped you up before. Run the full lyric in your head. When you hit a line you cannot retrieve, note it. That is the line you check when you arrive. Do not pull out your phone to look it up while driving. The blank itself is useful information.

In the green room. Walk through the first verse and chorus of the first three songs. Just the lyrics, just the changes, whatever feels least solid. Ten minutes of this is worth more than a distracted run-through with your instrument unplugged.

Between sets. Pick the song that felt shakiest during the first set. Run the trouble section in your head. The bridge transition, the key change, the second verse that almost slipped. When you hit it in the second set, the mental rehearsal has already reinforced the path.

The morning after the gig. Before you even look at your setlist notes, try to recall which songs gave you trouble the night before. The ones you remember without prompting are the ones that need attention before the next booking. The ones you forgot you forgot, those are even more urgent.

Mental practice does not replace your practice and readiness routine. It adds a second layer of reinforcement that physical practice alone cannot provide. And unlike physical practice, it costs you nothing in time you were not already spending. The drive, the wait, the downtime between sets.

How Repriso Enables Mental Practice

The modes in Repriso's reveal-level system are built to function as mental practice tools, not just screen-based review.

First-Letter mode gives you the opening letter of each line and nothing else. You cannot sight-read it. You have to retrieve the full lyric from memory. That is exactly the kind of cognitive effort that builds the mental map the guitarists in the study were developing. And because it runs on your phone, you can do it anywhere. Backstage, in the car, during soundcheck while the drummer is still setting up.

Fill-in-the-Blanks mode forces targeted retrieval on the parts of the song you are weakest on. If you consistently blank on the second half of verse two, Repriso will blank out those words more often. You are doing mental practice on the specific lines that need reinforcement, not re-running the whole song in your head.

And because Repriso tracks your stumbles, every mental practice session feeds back into the system. The lines you could not retrieve in the car become the lines the app surfaces before your next physical practice session.

The Bottom Line

Mental practice is not a shortcut or a substitute. It is a second retrieval pathway that makes your physical practice more durable. The guitarists in the study did not practice less. They practiced differently, and the difference showed up two weeks later when they needed it most.

If you are a gigging musician who spends downtime in the car, between sets, or waiting for load-in, you are already sitting on practice time you are not using. Ten minutes of mental rehearsal on the drive to the venue could be the difference between a solid set and a blank moment you spend the rest of the night recovering from.

Try Repriso free and build a practice system that works when your instrument is in the case.